Who Made That Kale?

Scientists disagree about when humans first tasted kale. But it is known that the ancient Greeks cultivated leafy greens, which they boiled and ate as a cure for drunkenness. And early Roman manuscripts include references to “brassica,” a word that encompassed wild turnips, cabbages and kalelike plants. By the Middle Ages, kale had spread through Europe and Asia. The Italians developed plants with “dinosaur” scales, while the Scots created varietals with leaves like frilly petticoats. The Russians produced kale that could survive in the snow. But by the time Tim Peters, who was then farming in Oregon, began experimenting with the plant in the 1980s, kale had become “boring.” “You only saw the green kind in the supermarket,” he says, “if you could find it at all.”

To create his own varietals, Peters planted Siberian kale on his farm, and also along roadsides, so that bees could cross-pollinate the vegetables with neighborhood weeds. “I love working with bees,” Peters says. “They’ll do stuff that you didn’t dream of.” One day he noticed that some of his blue-green Siberians had produced “babies” that looked nothing like their parents — they were red, with vellum-thin leaves. “I’d never seen kale like that before. I sent samples to seed companies, and they told me that it belonged to the red Russian family.” Peters, it turned out, had created several new types of red Russian kale, a varietal that had been around for centuries. He named one particularly delicate strain Winter Red. As kale caught on, so, too, did Winter Red: some companies grew “huge productions of it and released it as ‘Red Russian’ or ‘Russian,’ ” he says.

When growers introduced America to a rainbow of kales, from pink to purple, they created a new appetite for it, according to Drew Ramsey, a psychiatrist at Columbia University and a kale evangelist. The farmers’ markets that proliferated in the last decade, he says, also helped to make kale the darling of foodies and chefs. Lately, kale has spread to some unlikely places — the menu of the Cheesecake Factory and the pages of Us Weekly (“Stars Who Love Kale”). Ramsey’s own kale fever started two years ago. “When I look at a food, I think, How does it affect the brain? The nutrients in kale help to make us feel optimistic and ward off depression.” He decided the best way to improve America’s mental health was to push for a National Kale Day. The holiday has yet to be recognized by Congress, but Ramsey and his friends celebrated their first kale day on Oct. 2 this year. “We had a big party. We served kale cocktails, and then we danced.”

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KALE PROMOTER

Bo Muller-Moore creates and sells T-shirts, including the ones emblazoned with the slogan “Eat More Kale.”

It seems as if kale has become the darling of the left — a symbol of a certain kind of artisanal, ecological lifestyle. Do you agree? Yes. I can tell a lot about a person just based on whether they even know what kale is. If someone comes to me and says, “What’s kale?” I know that’s a person who is not going to farmers’ markets. If someone in Vermont does not know what kale is, I almost feel sorry for them.

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In 2011, the restaurant chain Chick-fil-A sued you for trademark infringement — claiming that your T-shirt slogan was too similar to its “Eat Mor Chikin” ads. Are you still allowed to sell your “Eat More Kale” shirts? To make me stop printing T-shirts, Chick-fil-A would have to prove customer confusion or loss of profit. I’ve sold the shirts for over 12 years. I’ve had thousands of conversations about this one design. People have made the joke “Oh, I thought it said ‘Eat More Whale,’ ” or “Oh, I thought it said, ‘Drink More Ale.’ ” Not once did anyone mention Chick-fil-A while asking about my shirts. So, I’ll keep making T-shirts until a civil court tells me not to.

Why do you think your “Eat More Kale” shirts are more popular than any other design you’ve created? That’s the million-dollar question. I think there is something about just the right three-word phrase, like Nike’s “Just Do It” or “Life is Good.”